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Will Romanian Churches Save the Day? The Survival of the Romanian language in Chicago

by Costanza Vallicelli Costanza Vallicelli is a MA student in Italian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the future, Costanza hopes to continue her graduate studies and become a professor, specializing in understudied Romance languages and heritage speakers. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. On Sunday mornings at Bethany Church, also known as Biserica Betania, a Romanian Pentecostal church in the northern suburbs of Chicago, dozens of people, most of them of Romanian origin, gather for the Sunday service. At the entrance of the church, people of all ages greet each other in a mix of English and Romanian. Once the service starts and the entire congregation joins together to celebrate their faith, their language of choice is one, and unified: Romanian. The church leaders conduct sermons in Romanian, the choir sings in Romanian, and members of the congregations pray aloud in Romanian. They might not be aware, b
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Does a new language catch up? Translation traction in Spanish and Croatian with Evidence from three EU corpora

by Yinglun Sun Yinglun Sun is a doctoral student in Linguistics at the University of Illinois. She uses quantitative and corpus methods to uncover patterns in human language production, and is particularly interested in the interactional nature of language use. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. One of the fundamental values of the European Union (EU) is the observance and respect of linguistic diversity. This is reflected by regulations that define 24 official languages for the EU, and provisions for the right of EU citizens to write to any of the institutions or bodies of the EU in one of these official languages, and to receive an answer in the same language. In addition, the major institutions of the European Union – such as the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the EU, the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank – all operate at some level of multilingualism in their written communicatio
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Post-Diaspora Borders and their Effect on Hindi-Urdu Differentiation in London

by Siddharth Ravuri Siddharth Ravuri is an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Political Science and Linguistics. Siddharth’s future plans including traveling, practicing international law, and using multiple languages. He wrote this blog post for 418 “Language and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. In the fall of 2022, a series of violent incidents between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester, England took place, to the shock of much of the global community who believed these differences to be conflicts of another continent entirely. Investigations of the incidents found that they had been caused by misinformation campaigns ran out of India in order to incite violence in Leicester (Chandra 2022). Why is the UK a battleground for the Hindu-Muslim conflict? The 1947 Partition of the British Raj caused the largest mass migration in human history, cleaving the Indian Subcontinent by religious divisions imposed by old colonial authorities. The
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English as the “caveman” language within the NHL

by Lindsay Nottingham Lindsay Nottingham is a recent University of Illinois graduate with a BS in Geology and minors in French and Anthropology. She now attends Fort Hays State University where she is pursuing a Master's Degree in Paleontology and Museum studies. In the future, she hopes to work in museum paleontological collections. This blog entry draws on her love of ice hockey and all things Finland. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. Figure 1: (L-R)Pekka Rinne, Mikko Rantanen, Miro Heiskanen, and Sebastian Aho posing at the 2019 NHL All Star Game Source: Getty Images The National Hockey League(NHL) is a professional ice hockey league with 32 teams across North America—25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. Figure 2: Map of the 32 NHL teams' locations across North America. Colors refer to divisions- pink for Pacific, yellow for Central, blue for Atlantic, and green for Metropolitan Source: Wikimedia Commons(backdrop) and 
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Will 27 Years be Enough? Vietnamese struggle for acceptance in Polish Society

by Szymon Kozioł  Szymon Kozioł is a junior in Political Science and Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Szymon’s future plans include applying to become a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department, traveling, and learning new languages. He wrote this blog post for 418 “Language and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. 60th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between Poland and Vietnam (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland)1.  www.flickr.com/photos/polandmfa/4343433086. Already starting in the 1950s “Vietnamese students coming for scholarships to communist Poland… with a peak of 800 beneficiaries per year at the beginning of the 1970s (Grzymala-Kazlowska, pg. 468), began arriving to Poland. This marked the first time in a while (with the exception of the Lipka Tatars), where a whole race, culture, and new language, started residing in Poland. The reason? Well let’s say it has to do something with Poland’s past. Since
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The French pronoun “iel” and what it reveals about the French’s relationship to their language

Image by Ted Eytan/Creative Commons  ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/27937114851 )  by Amy John Amy John (she/her) is a recent University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate with a double major in French Studies and Psychology. She plans to continue using French and to pursue a career in social work or a social work adjacent field. She wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. So, what is “iel” and why is it important? “Iel” is the French version of the English singular gender-neutral pronoun “they.” It is a combination of “il” (he) and “elle” (she) (Wagener, 2021). “Iel” and “they” are important for similar reasons. It helps us refer to people when we don’t know their gender without assuming their gender. Often, “he” or “il” are the automatic pronouns used to refer to an unknown person. For example, board game instructions often explain the game in terms of “he” as opposed to “they.” Doing this excludes everyone who doesn’t use these
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Friend or Foe? How the English language is shaping modern Denmark

Source: Wikimedia Commons by Bridget Handley Bridget Handley  is a Senior majoring in Accountancy and minoring in Political Science at the University of Illinois. Bridget is passionate about travel, having been to around 45 countries and recently studied abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark over the summer of 2022. Bridget recently was accepted into the Masters of Accountancy Science program, and aspires to be a corporate attorney.   She  wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. Denmark, a Scandinavian Country with a rich history and culture, is in a position of increasing globalization. Welcoming millions of tourists annually, and, according to Statista data, facing increasing amounts of immigration from 2020-2023 (with a notable 71% increase in immigration from 2021-2022), Denmark has been adjusting to various changes, practices, and cultures foreigners bring.  One of the largest impacts tourism, immigration and globalization through media, technolog
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